PCIe adapters supporting long distance 10GB fiber?

Wed Jun 21 07:35:33 UTC 2017

On 20 June 2017 at 17:10, Denys Fedoryshchenko <denys at visp.net.lb> wrote:
> On 2017-06-20 18:59, Hunter Fuller wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Jun 20, 2017 at 10:29 AM Chris Adams <cma at cmadams.net> wrote:
>>
>>> For Linux at least, the standard driver includes a load-time option to
>>> disable vendor check.  Just add "options ixgbe allow_unsupported_sfp=1"
>>> to your module config and it works just fine.
>>
>> For anyone who may be going down this road, if you have a two-port Intel
>> NIC, I discovered you have to pass "allow_unsupported_sfp=1,1" or it will
>> only apply to the first port. Hope that helps someone.
>
> Also it wont work with X710, you need to do NVRAM hack for it, SFP are
> checked in firmware.

We have third party SFPs in X710 "based" NIC. To be exact we some HPE
servers which have a "HPE Ethernet 10Gb 2-port 562SFP+ Adapter" which
uses an OEM X710 controller branded as HP. So it maybe that the HP SoC
on the NIC is allowing us to use any SFP. We haven't added any kernel
module load parameters to make that work or NVRAM hacks, we just
flashed the NIC to the lasted firmware version upon arrival as a
general good practice move and compiled the latest i40e & i40evf
drivers.

We have third party 10G SFP+'s (single more / 10Km / LC) working and
1G copper SFPs too, the ports are multi-rate. Again this may be
something special about the HP NIC and the X710 controller is ignorant
of the PHY <> MAC conversation or something.

Cheers,
James.